Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalRobots help find new tunnels at ancient temple in Peru's Andes
AUGUST 21, 2018 / 3:15 PM / UPDATED 8 HOURS AGO
Reuters Staff
2 MIN READ
LIMA (Reuters) - Small, camera-carrying robots helped archaeologists in Peru discover three new underground passageways holding ceramics, tools and human remains at the more than 3,000 year-old Chavin de Huantar temple in the Andes, Peru’s culture ministry said.
The robots, remote-controlled all-terrain vehicles carrying lights and cameras, were designed by engineers at the University of Stanford and helped explore narrow passageways at the ancient site, the ministry added.
One of the passageways contained the remains of three people, including one who appears to have been sacrificed, John Rick, an archaeologist with the University of Stanford, told journalists at Chavin de Huantar on Monday.
Chavin de Huantar was once a religious and administrative centre for people across the Andes. It was named after the Chavin people who grew crops in Peru’s central Andes more than 2,000 years ago.
More:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-peru-archaeology/robots-help-find-new-tunnels-at-ancient-temple-in-perus-andes-idUKKCN1L621X
Chavin de Huantar temple complex
Many more images:
https://tinyurl.com/y9vhy4yc
Baffling Viral Video Shows Ants Carrying Flowers to a Dead Bee
(Nicole Webinger)
What weird 'ritual' is this?
JACINTA BOWLER 22 AUG 2018
It looks like something out of a sad fairy tale. Tiny ants are pulling over petals, making a pile, and on top rests a dead bumblebee.
The original video was posted by Minnesota resident Nicole Webinger, but has since been taken down - although there's no shortage of copies proliferating across the internet.
"Saw this outside of my work by the garden. There was a dead bumblebee, and we were watching the ants bring flower petals and leaving them around the bumblebee," she wrote in a post accompanying the video, according to reshareworthy.
"It looked like they were having a funeral for it."
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-really-happening-in-this-video-of-ants-giving-a-bee-a-funeral
Honduran Prosecutors Withhold Evidence in Berta Cceres Murder Case
Honduran Prosecutors Withhold Evidence in Berta Cáceres Murder Case
Honduran activist Berta Cáceres addresses thousands of protesters in the Honduran capital following the country's 2009 coup d'état.
SANDRA CUFFE
BY
Sandra Cuffe Truthout
PUBLISHED
August 21, 2018
The trial of eight men charged with the murder of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres is right around the corner, but prosecutors may be heading to trial without important evidence. More than two dozen electronic devices seized in related raids as far back as 2016 were never subjected to analysis, according to an official response to Cáceres’s relatives from the Office of the Prosecutor for Crimes Against Life, a document that has not yet been made public.
Cáceres’s daughter Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres does not believe it was an oversight or lack of professionalism. Now serving as the general coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the organization her mother co-founded and led at the time of her murder, Zúñiga Cáceres views the revelations about the gaps in evidence as part of a strategy.
“It’s a form of denial, of refusing to determine what is really behind the murder,” she told Truthout.
Berta Cáceres was shot to death on March 2, 2016, in her home in La Esperanza, a town in western Honduras. Her longtime friend and colleague, Mexican activist Gustavo Castro, was wounded during the attack. As a prominent Indigenous and social movement leader, Cáceres had been receiving death threats related to her involvement with the COPINH-affiliated community struggle against the proposed Agua Zarca hydroeletric dam, currently on hold, and against Desarrollos Energéticos, S.A. (DESA), the company behind it.
“I will return, and I will be millions,” reads a flag with Berta Cáceres’s image outside the Siguatepeque courthouse during an April court case related to the authorization of the Agua Zarca dam.
SANDRA CUFFE
More:
https://truthout.org/articles/honduran-prosecutors-withhold-evidence-in-berta-caceres-murder-case/
Bioluminescent beauties: Australian creatures that glow
Lauderdale, Tasmania. IMAGE CREDIT: Matthew Holz Photography
BY AG STAFF | AUGUST 21, 2018
Whether for defence or to lure prey, the bioluminescence of these Australian animals is one of nature’s most beautiful scenes.
LIFE IN AUSTRALIA HAS adapted to our harsh climate in remarkable ways, but it’s those that use bioluminescence to lure prey, communicate and ward off predators, that have captured our attention.
Australia and New Zealand are the only places in the world where you can see glow worms in situ. Places like Glow Worm Glen in Bundanoon, NSW and the Melba Gully in the Great Otway National Park, VIC are popular not just with tourists, but local revellers too.
While we know why these glow worms become bioluminescent, some of Australia’s other glowing creatures are more mysterious, like the glowing scorpions of the Aussie outback, which continue to puzzle scientists.
More:
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2018/08/bioluminescent-beauties-meet-australias-sparkling-species/
Archaeologists explore a rural field in Kansas, and a lost city emerges
By DAVID KELLY
AUG 19, 2018 | 4:00 AM
| ARKANSAS CITY, KAN.
Of all the places to discover a lost city, this pleasing little community seems an unlikely candidate.
There are no vine-covered temples or impenetrable jungles here — just an old-fashioned downtown, a drug store that serves up root beer floats and rambling houses along shady brick lanes.
Yet there’s always been something — something just below the surface.
Locals have long scoured fields and river banks for arrowheads and bits of pottery, amassing huge collections. Then there were those murky tales of a sprawling city on the Great Plains and a chief who drank from a goblet of gold.
More:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-kansas-lost-city-20180819-htmlstory.html
Forgotten Women: The conversation of murdered and missing native women is not one North America want
Forgotten Women: The conversation of murdered and missing native women is not one North America wants to have - but it must
In the fifth in our series on the lives of ordinary women behind extraordinary stories, this month's Forgotten Women examines how terrifyingly deep the international crisis of violence against indigenous women runs
Lucy Anna Gray New York
6 days ago
It is North America’s dark, open secret that native women are far more likely to be raped, and far more likely to be murdered.
No justice. That is the constant cry from friends and families of victims as countless cases are left unresolved and ignored.
Marita Growing Thunder, a 19-year-old murdered and missing indigenous women (MMIW) activist from Montana, has experienced this lack of justice – five times.
In the early 2000s, Marita’s aunt died. Although Yvonne’s death was officially recorded as an overdose, Marita claims her aunt had been beaten. “All her fingernails had been pulled out. She was unrecognisable when we put her in the coffin. Her body was black and blue and swollen.”
More:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/native-american-women-missing-murder-mmiw-inquiry-canada-us-violence-indigenous-a8487976.html
Exclusive: Some Arctic Ground No Longer Freezing--Even in Winter
New data from two Arctic sites suggest some surface layers are no longer freezing. If that continues, greenhouse gases from permafrost could accelerate climate change.
BY CRAIG WELCH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATIE ORLINSKY
PUBLISHED AUGUST 20, 2018
CHERSKIY, RUSSIA - Nikita Zimov was teaching students to do ecological fieldwork in northern Siberia when he stumbled on a disturbing clue that the frozen land might be thawing far faster than expected.
Zimov, like his father, Sergey Zimov, has spent years running a research station that tracks climate change in the rapidly warming Russian Far East. So when students probed the ground and took soil samples amid the mossy hummocks and larch forests near his home, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Nikita Zimov suspected something wasn't right.
Sergey Zimov measures permafrost levels with his granddaughters near the Northeast Science Station which
he founded in Cherskiy, Russia, along the Kolyma River. About an hour away is Zimov's large-scale scientific
experiment Pleistocene Park, which he runs with his son, Nikita Zimov. The two believe that by recreating the
ecosystem of the Pleistocene era, which was dominated by grasslands and large mammals, they can slow
permafrost thaw.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KATIE ORLINSKY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
In April he sent a team of workers out with heavy drills to be sure. They bored into the soil a few feet down and found thick, slushy mud. Zimov said that was impossible. Cherskiy, his community of 3,000 along the Kolyma River, is one of the coldest spots on Earth. Even in late spring, ground below the surface should be frozen solid.
Every winter across the Arctic, the top few inches or feet of soil and rich plant matter freezes up before thawing again in summer. Beneath this active layer of ground extending hundreds of feet deeper sits continuously frozen earth called permafrost, which, in places, has stayed frozen for millennia.
More:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/08/news-arctic-permafrost-may-thaw-faster-than-expected/
On edit, sorry I had to add this photo, from the article. Have never seen anything like it:
The Batagaika Crater in the town of Batagay, Russia, is known as the "hell crater" or the "gateway to the underworld.” Over 300 feet deep and more than half a mile long, the depression is one of the largest in the world. Scientists believe it started forming in the 1960s when the permafrost under the area began to thaw after nearby forests were cleared.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KATIE ORLINSKY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Beautiful Portraits of the Standing Rock Sioux
Beautiful Portraits of the Standing Rock Sioux
Over a hundred years ago, Frank Bennett Fiske began photographing members of the Standing Rock Sioux.
Kelly Caminero
08.18.18 9:11 PM ET
- click for images -
https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/d_placeholder_euli9k/dpr_0.6666666865348816/c_limit,h_636/fl_lossy,q_auto/180814-Caminero-Standing-Rock-hero_duruqc
Frank Bennett Fiske, a North Dakota native, began to photograph members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in his studio at Fort Yates, North Dakota over a hundred years ago. Fiske photographed a various women and men Native Americans who were his friends and neighbors, and had lived on this reservation for more than 20 years. The Standing Rocks Portraits depict a selection of these stunning portraits that were taken with a large studio camera on glass plate negatives and have rarely been viewed in public until now.
More at link:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/beautiful-portraits-of-the-standing-rock-sioux/1
How Guatemala is sliding into chaos in the fight for land and water
John Vidal in Camotán
Sun 19 Aug 2018 04.00 EDT
At 9am on 9 May, Luis Arturo Marroquín walked out of a shop in the main square of the small town of San Luis Jilotepéque in central Guatemala. Eyewitnesses say a black Toyota Hilux pick-up then drove up and, in full view of passersby, two men wearing hoods shot Marroquín repeatedly in the back.
The vehicle sped off but was identified and, within hours, police had stopped and reportedly questioned the men and found the weapons. But since then, no arrests have been made or charges levelled and the investigation has stalled.
Marroquín was a Q’eqchi’ Mayan, and a leader of Codeca, a group of indigenous farmers now gaining political ground by defending people from evictions, land grabs and pollution resulting from mines, hydro dams, logging, and huge palm oil and sugar cane developments.
He is one of 18 human rights and indigenous “defenders” to have been murdered so far this year in a wave of rural violence. Of these, 13 were involved in land conflicts and nine were Codeca leaders. Two were journalists investigating disputes and of the seven people killed in the month following Marroquín’s death, one died in a church, another was rammed by a truck and a third was murdered while doing the shopping. Others were stabbed or hacked to death. Few people have been arrested, let alone convicted.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/19/guatemala-fight-for-land-water-defenders-lmining-loging-eviction
Uganda police arrest US citizen after viral video shows attack on hotel workers
Source: The Hill
BY JUSTIN WISE - 08/18/18 07:20 PM EDT
Police in Uganda said they arrested a U.S. citizen this week after reviewing video that appeared to show him physically attacking hotel employees.
The official account for the Uganda Police Force wrote on Twitter Friday that they had arrested Jimmy Taylor after reviewing footage of the incident, which occurred at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala, Uganda.
Taylor was detained at the Central Police Station in Kampala and is being charged with assault, police wrote on their official Twitter account.
"Thank you for your vigilance and sending us a video of an incident that happened at Grand Imperial Hotel. We have arrested the suspect, Jimmy Taylor, an American citizen," the Uganda Police Force Twitter account wrote. "He was detained at the Central Police Station, Kampala on charges of assault. #CommunityPolicing"
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/402498-us-citizen-arrested-in-uganda-after-attacking-hotel-workers-in
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